American Artist Wade Guyton Shows Small-Format Works at the Secession in Vienna

VIENNA.- In his exhibition Zeichnungen für ein kleines Zimmer (Drawings For A Small Room) at the Secession, American artist Wade Guyton shows small-format works characterized by a minimalist formal vocabulary. As his support medium, he uses pages from old art, architecture and lifestyle magazines which he prints over with an inkjet printer. The abstract idiom devised by the artist on the computer using standard word processing software and the results of this work process are imposed by the fluctuating quality of the printing technology. The works are often ripped or crumpled, with more or less ink applied, plus errors and problems of saturation.

Wade Guyton leaves his artworks to mechanical chance. Using a standard inkjet printer, he reproduces non-figurative compositions on canvas or paper. Specific combinations of image and imprint have different effects that are never entirely intended: sometimes the result appears serious, weighty and considered, while other times it seems unintentional and casual. Guyton’s work recalls the production aesthetic of movements like Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism. His praxis addresses issues of appropriation and the originality of the artwork, as well as timely manifestations of ordinary everyday copying and pasting. But even his choice of materials is at odds with purist discourse: prefabricated supports whose maximum width is dictated by industry standards, and thoroughly regulated computer programs and colour schemes that are more or less immune to the decisions of the artist subject.

In the Grafisches Kabinett, under the title Zeichnungen für ein kleines Zimmer, Guyton shows a five-part installation of “drawings”, thus adapting his artistic method to the conditions of the exhibition space. He sets down his reduced vocabulary of shapes on already printed paper which he tears from existing publications – seemingly at random, talking it as it comes – and “overwrites”. One can imagine him doing this incidentally while waiting for something else. In many cases, this waiting consists for him of the delay between starting a printing job and the printed page coming out of the printer – a period time he usually fills with surfing the internet, reading and writing e-mail, or artistic production. In this way, Wade Guyton weaves a fascinating network of reference systems that must keep referring to the “real” world in order to survive there.

The current exhibition at the Secession is so closely based on Guyton’s recent show at Galerie Capitain Petzel that it is almost a repetition – but not quite. At the Berlin show, in February 2011, there were unusually long vitrines with blue floor tiles and piles of Guyton’s overprinted pages. The difference between this and the exhibition at the Secession lies in the selection of works on paper and the colour of the tiled floor on which they are presented. Since an integral part of Guyton’s project is the fact that he piles up the pages on the kitchen floor of his New York apartment while he works, in order to view them in this context and decide which to continue working with, the exhibition at the Secession obliged him to have his kitchen re-floored – this time with red tiles.

“People talk about chance or the accident in my work,” says Guyton, “and there are lots of accidents and chances involved – but, nevertheless there is often an aspect of the accident I finally turn into a template to repeat. It’s rather momentary chance and then structured repetition – let’s say it’s formalized chance. The blue floor was never intended to be a sculpture. It was only after using it in Cologne and Berlin that the importance of the kitchen became clear. And for the exhibition of drawings to be repeated, it required a difference – and the color of the floor was one variable that could be shifted. So in order to show these new drawings a whole new kitchen floor needed to be built. I chose red.”

Wade Guyton, born in Hammond (Indiana, USA) in 1972, lives and works in New York City (USA).

Selected Solo Exhibitions:
2011: Zeichnungen für ein kleines Zimmer, Secession, Vienna; Galerie Capitain Petzel, Berlin; 2010: Museum Ludwig, Cologne; 2009: Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Deurle; 2008: Portikus, Frankfurt am Main; 2007: Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York; Galerie Francesca Pia, Zürich; The Suburban, Chicago; 2006: Paintings, westlondonprojects, London; Color, Power & Style, Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York; 2005: Color, Power & Style, Kunstverein Hamburg, Hamburg; Art 36 Statements, Galerie Francesca Pia, Basel Art Fair, Basel; 2004: Objects are Much More Familiar, Power House, Memphis; 2003: Elements of an Incomplete Map, Artists Space, New York; 1999: Andrew Kreps Gallery Project Space, New York; 1998: MFA exhibition, Hunter College, New York

Selected Group Exhibitions:
2011: Abstract Possible, curated by Maria Lind, Museo Tamayo, Mexico City; Systemanalyse, curated by Christiane Schneider, Langen Foundation, Düsseldorf; 2010: Curious? Art in The 21st Century from Private Collections, Kunsthalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Bonn; 2009: Beg Borrow and Steal, Rubell Family Collection/Contemporary Art Foundation, Miami; Besides, With, Against, And Yet: Abstraction and The Ready-Made Gesture, curated by Deb Singer, the Kitchen, New York; 2008: T2 Torino Triennial, curated by Daniel Birnbaum, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin; Around Max Bill, Centre Culturel Suisse, Paris; 2007: Tbilisi 4: Everyday is Saturday, curated by Daniel Baumann, Tbilisi; Biennale de Lyon, Museum of Contemporary Art, Lyon; What is Painting? curated by Anne Umland, Museum of Modern Art, New York; 2006: Tbilisi 3. Let’s Stay Alive Till Monday, curated by Daniel Baumann, Children’s National Gallery, Georgia; 2005: Unburied/Reburied, curated by Hans-Jürgen Hafner, Kunstbunker, Nuremberg; 2004: Formalismus. Moderne Kunst, heute/Formalism: Modern Art, Today, Kunstverein in Hamburg; Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; 2003: Junge Szene (Kontext, Form, Troja), curated by Daniel Baumann, Secession, Vienna; 2002: Building Structures, MoMA PS1, Long Island City; 2001: David Brody, Mark Grotjahn, Wade Guyton, Siobahn Liddell, Gorney, Bravin, + Lee, New York; 2000: New York Projects, Delfina, London.

Related posts:

1. Thirty Artists Contribute New Works for Exhibition at Vienna’s Secession
2. David Zwirner presents an exhibition of small and large new works by German artist Neo Rauch
3. Sculptural Installations by Francis Upritchard at Vienna’s Secession
4. Marc Camille Chaimowicz Creates an Environment at Vienna’s Secession
5. Museum in The Hague Shows Large-Format Polaroid Photos by Julian Schnabel